Project Work Packages

The FLAMENCO project is structured around the three research pillars shown in the figure below. The left pillar is concerned with the input from the society necessary for the successful development and use of citizen observatories. The right pillar focuses on output to society by providing policy support and indicators about the quality of participation, and the quality of sensorial and mobility data collected through specific campaign. The final, central pillar is concerned with the development of the Reconfigurable Citizen Observatory Platform. The part overarching these three pillars is concerned with FLAMENCO’s valorisation.

First Pillar: From Society to Technology

This research pillar is concerned with the input from society for the successful development and use of citizen observatories. A first goal is to research the issue of motivating and engaging participants before, during and after participatory sensing campaigns. This is crucial as no campaign can survive without participants to follow it through, not only because of the required measuring but also because of their invaluable local knowledge. A second goal is to identify current practices, opportunities and challenges for environmental as well as mobility-related participatory sensing campaigns. The conclusions that can be drawn from this research pillar’s research should lead to a citizen observatory conceptual design that is used as a starting point for the second research pillar.

Second Pillar: Citizen Observatory Platform

The work that needs to be conducted in this second research pillar is divided into three work packages. The role of the first work package (WP3) is to research and develop the distributed data delivery platform and the cloud-based campaign monitoring system. WP5 provides the data-gathering and data-processing platform. Its processing and analysis engine must be customisable by the stakeholder, who can tailor the engine to the expected outcome of the campaign, using the campaign enactment platform. WP4 focuses on producing a suite of reusable and composable campaign enactment components and on enabling the interaction between and composition of the latter. It forms the front of the technical platform towards the outside world, which end-users will use to define, monitor and analyse campaigns. It is also the interface towards underlying technical components from WP3 and WP5, which are not directly accessible to end users.

Third Pillar: From Technology to Society

The third research pillar of FLAMENCO is concerned with the output to the society. While the technology for participatory data collection is created in by the second research pillar, the research in this third pillar is dedicated to ensure that produced data is up to stakeholder standards and conform to their expectations. The aim is to tackle this transparent to end-users insofar as possible, so that they do not need to be concerned about the technical details of setting up successful campaigns. Because of the nature of the data produced by the second research pillar (data which is typically still very diverse and not easily intelligible by campaign organisers), a methodology to transform this data into meaningful environmental and mobility-related policy indicators must be developed.

Valorisation

Next to the three research pillars, FLAMENCO’s structure also consists of an overarching part, namely the project’s valorisation. The main goal of this part is to bring the project’s research outcomes together in a realistic, real-world use case which is parametrisable according to the specific requirements of the core user group members.